Joel Colton | Historian, 92

Joel Colton, 92, a historian who for more than 50 years collaborated on a textbook that has introduced generations of college students to modern history, died April 17 at his home in Durham, N.C. The cause was congestive heart failure.

The textbook, A History of the Modern World, was written in 1950 by the Princeton historian R.R. Palmer and published by Knopf. Mr. Colton, a professor at Duke University, collaborated with Palmer on the next nine editions, regularly updating it. About two million copies have been sold.

McGraw-Hill, the current publisher, said the textbook had been translated into 10 languages and had been used in more than 1,000 colleges, universities, and high schools. The 10th edition was published in 2006 with a third contributor, Lloyd Kramer. In 1987, the New York Times included it on a list of 19 textbooks considered classics in their field.

Despite the book's high sales and accolades, some readers bemoaned its dense prose and considerable heft - about four pounds. Mr. Colton was quick to defend it. "It's both scholarly and readable," he said 2002. "It was never intended to be only a textbook. It was meant to be a book to be read."

Born in the Bronx, Mr. Colton received a bachelor's degree in history from City College and a master's in history from Columbia in 1940. He began teaching at Duke in 1947 and completed his doctorate in history at Columbia in 1950. In 1951, he published his first book, Compulsory Labor Arbitration in France, and in 1968, The Twentieth Century, part of Time-Life's Great Ages of Man series.

He was chairman of Duke's history department from 1967 to 1974, when he left to serve as director for humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. He retired at Duke in 1989.

- N.Y. Times News Service